It’s no exaggeration to say that David Fincher is one of the most beloved directors of the 21st century. Fincher started his career with a slew of groundbreaking music videos and landed his first feature film appearance in 1992 as a director Stranger 3. Although that movie has many fans of the Alien franchise, Fincher directed some great movies and developed his signature style over time. Today he is seen as a provocative author. Fincher’s films, which mostly fall into the psychological thriller genre, have garnered 40 Oscar nominations over the years, as well as countless other accolades. Some of his best known films include Fight club, Seven, Missing girl, The girl with the dragon tattooAnd The social network. Right up there with those classics is his 2007 film Zodiacwith Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.
A gem of a true crime movie, Zodiac tells the unsolved mystery of the “Zodiac Killer,” who was at the center of a series of brutal murders that took place in the 1960s and 1970s in the San Francisco Bay Area. While the movie isn’t usually the first thing people think of when they think of David Fincher – and despite its poor box office performance – it can be argued that it’s the director’s masterpiece. This is why Zodiac is Fincher’s most underrated film.
Underwhelming Box Office Returns, Overwhelming Terror
When Zodiac first released in the spring of 2007, it bombed at the box office and quickly faded from view for a big-budget movie from a major filmmaker. The film was considered a failure by the studio and did not last long in theaters. Unlike Fincher’s other films, Zodiac was not seen by the critical world as a particularly laudable picture, and so was skipped entirely by the Academy Awards. While reviews were generally favorable, many critics expressed frustration with the film’s long running time and lack of a satisfying ending. However, on the other side of the critical consensus, some reviewers pointed out that it was these two factors that made the film so great; the long runtime is packed with crucial information and character development, and the lack of an ending is not only realistic (the killer was never caught) but is the film’s biggest scare.
As Polygon aptly puts it, “There is no cathartic closure. We no longer have any ending. It’s the anti-Fincher ending, but it’s also the most powerful. The Zodiac killer was never discovered in real life, and Fincher ends up with a bit of nothing, conveying the same kind of discouragement felt by many people in Northern California and the detectives who devoted their lives to the case. It’s a shocking downer of an ending that instills fear and frustration in the viewer, and the most memorable ending in Fincher’s filmography.
Police procedure meets horror
One of the most interesting and unique aspects of Zodiac is the way it fuses genres seamlessly. Part character-driven drama, it does a great job developing both Gyllenhaal’s insightful cartoonist and Downey Jr.’s dogged reporter. It’s also a fastidious police procedural, and Fincher spares no details, opting to go all in on the realism factor, depicting every rabbit hole the detectives have made in real life. Outside of these two genres, the movie works just as well as a horror movie. While it never devolves into thoroughly slasher territory, the killer scenes in Zodiac are some of the most terrifying scenes of the 21st century, and the moments when Gyllenhaal uncovers another clue inspire as much dread as fulfillment. As Collider puts it“The movie is known for some haunting sequences that brought to life the sheer terror experienced by Californians at the time.”
Unparalleled attention to detail
Zodiac is one of the most meticulously detailed films in Fincher’s career, if not all time. The police procedural aspect of the film is fully realized, with every piece of evidence from the real case presented in a historically accurate manner and explained in depth. Additionally, Zodiac shows San Francisco as it really was in the ’60s and ’70s. Instead of the usual pink glasses through which most filmmakers view their historical films, the world of Zodiac is authentically scuzzy, almost to the point of being anti-nostalgic. It doesn’t play with the stereotypical “hippie era” stuff that’s central to most movies portraying this city at this particular moment, but presents the city as the average working Joe would have seen it. Even the small details of the workplace mattered to Fincher. In the words of Roger Ebert, who knew a thing or two about working in a newspaper office, “I found the newspaper office intriguing in its accuracy. For starters, it’s usually pretty empty, and it was true in a morning newspaper in those days when the office started to heat up as the deadline approached. It’s this incredible attention to detail that makes it Zodiac stand out as one of Fincher’s best films.
Incredible performances from a star-studded cast
Another reason Zodiac is so outstanding that the cast is packed with top talent. The film features one of Jake Gyllenhaal’s best performances as the political cartoonist turned amateur detective Robert Graysmith, as well as great supporting roles from Chloë Sevigny and Anthony Edwards. A particular highlight of the film is the inclusion of two incredible actors shortly after Zodiac, would go on to superstardom in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr., both of whom give some of the best performances of their careers. In brief, Zodiac is brilliantly acted and it’s baffling that the amazing cast has been overlooked at many prestigious awards shows.